The Wild Unadulterated Joy of Revolt

For more than a week, a coalition of Chicago activists including patients and staff from the Woodlawn Mental Health Clinic, representatives from the Mental Health Movement, STOP Chicago, and Occupy Chicago have been protesting the closure of six mental health care facilities as part of austere city budget cuts. In order to save a reported $2.3 million, the city has already closed two neighborhood clinics, and plans to shut down an additional four. Officials argue that by shutting down these facilities, they will be able to restructure and provide more options for consumers and say they’ve invested $500,000 already in expanding services for psychiatric care and plan to increase access to services. Such measures are a kick to the guts of the people most in urgent need of mental health care. Those most wholly affected by this are poor, held hostage by not only their health needs but limited access to funding for care. Two patients from one of the closed clinics are currently in psychiatric hospitalization because they entered crisis after its closure, according to N’Dana Carter, an activist with Mental Health Movement.

Caregivers, patients and activists know that shutting down public neighborhood clinics will have disastrous effects on people receiving services. Mental well-being is essential to human health. Not one person in Chicago remains unaffected by mental health issues: depression, bipolar disorder, panic attacksm anxiety disorder, PTSD, schizophrenia, insomnia or hypersomnia, and anhedonia, among many others affect a huge portion of the population. Everyone has been heartbroken by the behavior of someone who needs mental health services. The availability of mental health care is an issue that crosses all class and race lines. It is a crucial human service. Mayor Rahm Emanuel seems to be determined, with little research or apparent forethought, to value NATO security funding, flowers in parks, and the 1% Lakefront Trail to Nowhere more than the well being of the very citizens who elected him to office.

Though the Mental Health Movement and their allies made hundreds of phone calls, delivered petitions signed with thousands of names and staged a sit-in at Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s office at City Hall until being removed, their words fell on deaf ears. With most other options exhausted, 23 doctors, nurses, mental health patients, medics, and Occupy Chicago members decided to barricade themselves inside one of the clinics slated for closure last week to force the city to listen to their demands. Hundreds gathered outside in solidarity to support them. Soon after Chicago Police arrested those inside, protesters set up an encampment outdoors across the street from the clinic in order to continue their fight. From Saturday, April 14 until the wee hours of Tuesday, April 17, the vacant lot was alive with music, dancing, children’s laughter, sidewalk murals, and educational sharing that created a greater sense of understanding, sharing, and community building in the long shadow of austerity. In the rain and high winds, campers remained in spirited involvement, dedicated to their cause.

>The activists’ claim that they have no way of “attracting attention” to their demands
and of getting what they want except by force—by violent demonstrations,
obstruction and destruction—is a pure throwback to the Progressive nursery school,
where a tantrum was the only thing required to achieve their wishes. Their hysterical
screaming still carries a touch of pouting astonishment at a world that does not
respond to an absolute such as: “I want it!” The three-year-old whim-worshiper
becomes the twenty-year-old thug.

Any Rand, “The Comprachicos” (1970)

JaceD

Perhaps I missed the point of your comment entirely, but are you suggesting that the people in this article who suffer from mental illness’ are like three year olds throwing a tantrum?

rtb61

All about dumping the mentally ill on the justice system because it is cheaper. For profit prisons need more profits so they are simply turning the mentally ill out of hospitals so that they can be arrested and, spend the remainder of their seriously shortened lives as uncontrollable prisoners is solitary confinement.
With ring wingers all the while screaming beat them, tase them, pepper spray them, strap them down in their own faeces and urine, until they die, they deserve it for misbehaving. This shutting down of mental treatment facilities has resulted in the explosion of the number of tea bagging Republicans.

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